World’s first steel tensile structure at the All-Russia Exposition in 1896, via Wikipedia . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure and industrial technology. This week we look at Tokyo’s cheap housing and expensive land, the House response to the Senate housing bill, an IED near an Alabama dam, Fervo’s IPO, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housekeeping items...

Recently I posted about our Minecraft server , and mentioned on Mastodon that I’d rebuilt our Dynmap server with MariaDB. A few of you wanted to know what I was talking about, what I did, and why, especially those of you maintaining servers for their kids. Clara and I started playing Minecraft as a silly distraction during the 2020 COVID lockdowns, and we’re still playing on the same map and server today. As such, we’ve explored large swaths of the map, with coordinates stretching int...

Last week I spent a day at a retreat that brought together several people working in software development to talk about the profession’s future with the rise of agentic programming. The event was help under the Chatham House Rule , so I can’t attribute the comments and stories I heard. (If anyone recognizes themselves, and would like attribution, let me know.) Here are a few tidbits that caught my notebook.  ❄                ❄ One group developed a behavioral clon...

In my recent post I motivated the elimination tree and gave a loose derivation from the cholesky task DAG. I thought it might be nice to visualize the actual tree computation algorithm (without path compression) to help develop intuition on how it represents fill-in in such a compact form. I asked codex to build this visualization which I share below: Open the elimination tree visualization You can step forwards or backwards in the elimination tree calculation. Fill-in entries get colore...

I didn’t expect DwarfStar 4 (https://github.com/antirez/ds4) to become so popular so fast. It is clear that there was a need for single-model integration focused local AI experience, and that a few things happened together: the release of a quasi-frontier model that is large and fast enough to change the game of local inference, and the fact that it works extremely well with an extremely asymmetric quants recipe of 2/8 bit, so that 96 or 128GB of RAM are enough to run it. And, of course: all t...

I just got an email from Amazon saying they're finally going to respect robots.txt . Here's the verbatim email I got: We are writing to inform you that starting Monday, June 15, 2026, crawl preferences for Amazonbot will be managed solely through the industry-standard directives. This gives you direct, ongoing control over how Amazonbot accesses your site, rather than relying on manual requests. If you do not implement robots.txt directives by that date, Amazonbot will follo...

Last year I said I'd probably never recommend another Bambu Lab printer again . I still use my P1S, but after Bambu Lab started pushing their always-connected cloud solution as the new default: I blocked the printer from the Internet via my OPNsense Firewall I stopped updating the firmware I locked the printer into Developer mode I deleted Bambu Studio and started using OrcaSlicer I had to do that to keep it under my control, instead of Bambu's. Last year I said I'd probabl...

This article was originally drafted in 2024 but I struggled to finish it then. I was stuck wondering if I was just moaning over the past. Recently, Salma and Jo both shared thoughts that gave me the rage and energy to come back to this. Today is the day I finally have the courage to publish. I can’t recall how many times I thought of writing something like this. I thought of riding certain waves inspired by other authors but most times the embarrassment got the best of me. During those w...

Techniker Krankenkasse topped the Stern and Statista ranking of best companies to work for in Germany 2026 with a score of 85.38 out of 100, leaping from 14th place the year before. The annual survey polled over 20,000 employees across 2,600 companies in 24 industries, generating more than one million individual ratings. This article breaks down the full rankings, industry-level standouts, year-over-year shifts, and what Germany’s current labor market means for job seekers in 2026. Best Com...

Over the years, anticipation has built for the start of observations at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in the mountains of the Atacama Desert in Chile. Originally imagined in the mid-1990s as the Dark Matter Telescope, Rubin is designed to study our constantly moving and changing universe in greater detail than ever before. Once every few days for a decade, Rubin will take images of the entire… Source Over the years, anticipation has built for the start of observations at the Vera C. Rubin O...

TL;DR: “Private by obscurity” has been dissolved. Internal tools often have layering boundaries that are enforced only by convention. It’s natural to assume a “high trust environment”, where privileged actions are discouraged by obscurity and goodwill instead of hard technical boundaries. Coding agents have dissolved this obscurity, and as a result internal platform engineering now really demands a security mindset. 1 During a recent codebase audit, a coworker and I discovered a...

Hello! 8 years ago, I wrote excitedly about discovering Tailwind . At that time I really had no idea how to structure my CSS code and given the choice between a pile of complete chaos and Tailwind, I was really happy to choose Tailwind. It helped me make a lot of tiny sites! I spent the last week or so migrating a couple of sites away from Tailwind and towards more semantic HTML + vanilla CSS, and it was SO fun and SO interesting, so here are some things I learned! As usual I’m not a fu...

For those very long-time readers this blog extensively covered prediction markets  from 2006 to 2008. In a prediction market, you have a future event, such as the winner of an election, and a market that pays off one dollar if that event happens and nothing if it doesn't. The price of this market corresponds to a predicted probability that the event will happen.  I worked with David Pennock and Yiling Chen to create an interactive map that colored every state based on how likely it was to ...

At this evening’s Homebrew Website Club , I asked: What was the biggest change in our websites since we started them? This question was inspired in part by Paul saying something to the effect of how we build our websites and, in the process, figure out what we want our websites to be. There are many lenses through which to think about the question – the technology behind a website, the design of a website 1 , the philosophies and goals behind our website, and more. My answer was that a f...

I remember that in those ancient times when the year number still had two zeroes in the middle, I read an article in a computer magazine, it was either CD-Action, or CHIP, an article about this new idea: a printer that could print object in 3D from plastic! The article said that already prototypes were being build, and maybe one day in the future this novel idea might become popular. The 3D printer in all it's glory Fast forward a few tens of years, buzz through the pandemic, and here I am...

I’ve recently been using iReal Pro on an iPad to practice improvisation. It’s a convenient way to play backing parts for a chord progression. But creating and editing progressions in the app is a frustrating experience. Unfortunately, iReal Pro, like most apps, is a walled garden. Short of filing a ticket and hoping it will one day be prioritized, there isn’t much I can do to improve the situation. One of the themes we talk about at Ink & Switch is “ situated software ”, tools that a...

Ever since Golden Gate Claude I’ve been fascinated with “steering”: the idea that you can guide LLM outputs by directly manipulating the activations of the model mid-flight. DeepSeek V4 Flash I was inspired to write this post by antirez’s recent project DwarfStar 4 , which is a version of llama.cpp that’s been stripped down to run only DeepSeek-V4-Flash. What’s so special about this model? It might be what many engineers have been waiting for: a local model good enough to co...

Here's an attempt to answer questions I get about why I don't use AI, and any more I could think of that may also arise. I'll try to get into it as honestly as possible, without just falling back on "it sucks and is bad" and leaving it at that. Read more on the site… Here's an attempt to answer questions I get about why I don't use AI, and any more I could think of that may also arise. I'll try to get into it as honestly as possible, without just falling back on "it sucks and is bad" and...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with RMF, whose blog can be found at baccyflap.com/prs/blog . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself? My name's rmf. My legal name's not terribly har...

In 1919, Benito Mussolini founded the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento in Milan with about 200 members, most of them war veterans who felt cheated by the peace settlement and threatened by socialist organizing in the factories. Three years later he was Prime Minister of Italy; twelve years after that, he was a war criminal presiding over the industrial massacre of Ethiopian civilians, a campaign in which his air force dropped mustard gas on villages that had neither anti-aircraft weapons nor ga...

Catch Flakes On Main May 14, 2026 A small Mechanical Habit today: When using not rocket science rule / merge queue, continue to redundantly run the full test suite on main. Maintain an easily accessible list of recent main failures — these are the flaky tests to eradicate. For an example, see the “Flakes” link on https://devhub.tigerbeetle.com Flaky tests are tests that fail intermittently, once in a thousand runs. This might be due to a genuine bug (assump...

TAIPEI (May 13, 2026) – Shield AI, the defense-tech company building the world’s best AI pilots and next-generation aircraft, and Thunder Tiger Corp., one of Taiwan’s leading manufacturers of unmanned surface and aerial systems, announced today a memorandum of understanding to integrate Shield AI’s Hivemind autonomy software across Thunder Tiger’s unmanned systems portfolio, beginning with unmanned surface vessels (USVs). As a first milestone, Hivemind will serve as the AI pilot on a...

In compilers, static single information form (SSI) is a common extension to static single assignment form (SSA). It was introduced by C. Scott Ananian in 1999 in his MS thesis (PDF) 1 . SSI extends your existing SSA intermediate representation by discovering facts from your existing program and reifying them as path-dependent/flow-sensitive IR nodes. That might sound complicated, but at least the basic idea is pretty natural. I talk a little bit about it in What I talk about when I talk a...